appears to have put the purely metaphysical question, "Are these
beings spiritual or material?"(1) Now, if a race were discovered which
believed in such beings, yet had no faith in spirits, that race could
not be called irreligious, as it would have to be called in Mr. Tylor's
"minimum definition". Almost certainly, no race in this stage of belief
in nothing but unconditioned but not expressly spiritual beings is
extant. Yet such a belief may conceivably have existed before men had
developed the theory of spirits at all, and such a belief, in creative
and moral unconditioned beings, not alleged to be spiritual, could not
be excluded from a definition of religion.(2)

(1) See The Making of Religion, pp. 201-210.

(2) "The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind, proves
to demonstration that the thought of God is a far easier thought, and a
far earlier, than that of a spirit." Father Tyrrell, S. J., The Month,
October, 1898. As to the Jews, the question is debated. As to our own
infancy, we are certainly taught about God before we are likely to be
capable of the metaphysical notion of spirit. But we can scarcely reason
from children in Christian houses to the infancy of the race.

For these reasons we propose (merely for the purpose of the present
work) to define religion as the belief in a primal being, a Maker,
undying, usually moral, without denying that the belief in spiritual
beings, even if immoral, may be styled religious. Our definition is
expressly framed for the purpose of the argument, because that argument
endeavours to bring into view the essential conflict between religion
and myth. We intend to show that this conflict between the religious
and the mythical conception is present, not only (where it has been
universally recognised) in the faiths of the ancient civilised peoples,
as in Greece, Rome, India and Egypt, but also in the ideas of the lowest
known savages.

It may, of course, be argued that the belief in Creator is itself a
myth. However that may be, the attitude of awe, and of moral obedience,
in face of such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the
Christian religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, humorous, and
wildly irrational fables about that being, or others, is essentially
mythical in the ordinary significance of that word, though not absent
from popular Christianity.

Now, the whole crux and puzzle of mythology is, "Why, having attained
(in whatever w